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“It’s not what you’re saying; it’s not always like that...” “It should never be like that, Caspien.”
He was talking quickly, rashly, saying these things as though they were fantastical and not as though I’d spent years imagining them in very great detail.
I don’t know what Gideon’s made you believe, but you deserve to be happy. Letting people love you is okay.”
I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you, I think. Even when I thought I hated you, I loved you. I don’t think I know how not to, so please don’t go back there. Don’t choose that, choose me. Stay with me.
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I ruin everything I touch. Christ, my own mother loathed me. I ruined her and I’ll ruin you as well and I don’t want that. I don’t want to be the one to ruin you, Jude. Not you.”
“If you go back there, if you choose him now, then we’re done. I’m done. I can’t watch you do this to yourself. I won’t.”
“Not anymore. It’s over. Don’t come to me again.” He smiled, sadly, and nodded once. “Finally, he learns.”
You ruined him. So much that he thinks he deserves the kind of life he’s living now with that piece of shit.
“I’m sorry that someone broke your heart, Gideon, really I am, because there’s no pain on earth like it. But I’ve survived heartbreaks too and I still have a fucking soul. I’m still capable of love. And the fact that you’re not tells me one thing, you’re weak. Weak and sad and bitter and that’s the reason you’re going to die alone.”
Boston. I hope you’re happy, though I suspect you’re not. (This isn’t the comfort I wish it was, trust me.)
I still love you. I think I always will. But it’s like my parents, I’m never going to stop loving them, I’m only going to get better at living without them loving me back.
P.S – I didn’t mean what I said that night in the rain. You can always come back to me. You can always call me. I’ll always answer, Cas.
Eight Years Later
“He will not let me utter your name. It’s the only condition he has when he calls. The first time I asked about you, I did not hear from him for an entire year.”
“So then you do not know?” “Know what?” “That he left him. Two years ago.
“Money isn’t comfort to me, Gideon. Comfort is going to sleep with the person you love wrapped up in your arms. It’s knowing the people you love are safe and happy. Comfort’s not choosing a piece of shit grooming abuser over someone who would have spent every day trying to make you happy. Comfort is knowing you deserve happiness and to be loved. That’s my comfort, Gideon. He was my comfort, and I would have been his, and you’re part of the reason neither of us has it. So keep your fucking money. I’m not interested in it.”
“He chose you,” Gideon said.
“But he wanted you to have it, to have Oxford, to be happy without him.”
What he did for you, because he chose you, because he loved you.”
But not once, not in any scenario, had I thought it was Cas.
“You said he left Blackwell two years ago.” Gideon knew what I was asking, what I now understood. “As soon as he turned twenty-five.”
“He chose you. He chose you when he was sixteen, in the only way that made sense to him. He thought Xavier was a different kind of man then, yes, but when he knew that he wasn’t, he chose to protect you instead of himself.”
He wanted you to live your dream...” “He was my fucking dream, Gideon!”
But then in London you were...you. Different in some ways, wiser almost, but you were still you and incredibly, you still loved me.
I loved him. I’d loved him for years.
Jude was the only kind of love I’d ever known.
A flashback, a phantom pain over the fingers of my right hand. When I’m talking to you, you will fucking look at me, do you hear me!? The weighty top bashed down onto my fingers once, twice, three times. The pain excruciating.
a catalogue of songs that had become our story: The Boy. The Gardener. The Beach. The Reader. The Library. Oxford. London. Oleander.
Oleander: the piece I was most confident in, the one I’d worked on longest. The one I’d been lost in the night Xavier broke my hand. That night, I’d boarded a plane and left him for the first time, only to find Jude, inexplicably, waiting for me on the other side of the ocean.
“I really want to kiss you,” he said after a moment. “Can I?” “You never have to ask me that, Jude.”
No matter how I’d hurt him, he loved me the same as he always had. With everything that he had.
if Jude could love me, Jude who was perfect, Jude who was the sun, then it meant I was worth loving.
Gideon had raised me to be something cold and poisonous, Xavier had tried to crush me to dust, but Jude had just loved. Tender and sweet. No matter who or what I came to him as, he’d loved me. Every version of me.
“I’m never losing you again, Cas. You realise that, don’t you?” “You never lost me,” I said.
I was always his. Just like he was always mine.
“Come for me, let me see you...fuck, that’s it, baby. Look at you. You’re so beautiful, Cas. So beautiful. So perfect. I love you so much.”
I’d never said it before. Not once, to anyone.
“I love you, Jude,” I said in a strangely formal voice. I heard it against my ear; the sound of his heart skipping its regular rhythm. “What?” “I love you,” I said again.
“Say it again,” he said when he came up for air. His grin was still pulling at the sides of his mouth. “I love you.” “One more time.” “I’m not a performing monkey, no.”